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Tuesday, December 30, 2014

Those with rocks in the head see rocks

Mars coffin: why do we see faces and suspicious objects on the surface of other planets?

Coffin in center of picture. NASA

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The difference between the animal world and the human world is that some humans can appreciate and differentiate the wonders of life. Earth is filled with wondrous things, mountains, rocks, waterfalls, trees, flowers, etc. And the night skies sparkle with planets, stars and cosmic magic. Animals for the most part don't give a hoot about the wonders on earth or in space. Feed them and walked them and they are in seventh heaven. Many humans are just as disinterested in the real wonders in space, don't know what's up there and don't give a hoot. lol

NASA doesn't need worry about that crowd. The crowd they worry about are those on the fence. So for them they come up with the ridicule factor. Make fun of the lunatic crowd that claim to see UFOs and other strange phenomena, when all they are seeing is rocks on Mars, swamp gas at Alien craft sightings, and crash dummies and weather balloons when some officer screwed up and showed real evidence of a crashed UFO.

We humans are nobody's fools and no one is going to laugh at someone that sees rocks on Mars, test dummies at Roswell, and swamp gas at UFO sightings.

Space-watchers have got excited about a coffin spotted on Mars — but it’s just one in a run of mysterious objects spotted on the planet

There could be a mysterious stone coffin on Mars. Or, more likely, it’s just the latest example of pareidolia — seeing faces and other objects in our surroundings.

The phenomenon refers not only to seeing things in objects, but spotting something significant in anything random. That includes hearing messages on records that aren’t there — and also common space-based sightings like that man in the moon or the Moon rabbit.
Scott Waring, a blogger who writes about examples of suspicious objects in space as well as other conspiracies, said that a coffin-shaped rock he spotted — which then went viral — should be enough to make the Mars rover turn around and go back and investigate.
“Coffins are made to stand the test of time, but this one is made from a stone like substance,” he wrote in a blog post yesterday. “What would it take to get NASA to turn the rover around and examine the contents of this box?
“It looks to be about one meter across and a foot and a half wide and high. Lots of alien species are short, including a species of greys.” (Greys are the kind of alien often depicted in cartoons — with big heads and smooth grey skin, from where they get their name.)But a look at the larger pictures show just how many potential objects of interested could be spotted in that one photo alone. There are hundreds of rock formations in the shot — any of which could have tumbled in such a way as to look like something else.The photo, taken by the Curiosity Rover, that contains the supposed coffin on MarsThe phenomenon is part of our evolutionary heritage, according to some scientists, helping us to detect faces from birth.
Dr Nouchine Hadjikhani told the BBC: "If you take a baby just after a few minutes of life, he will direct his attention toward something that has the general features of a face versus something that has the same elements but in a random order”.
Seeing something significant is almost always a better bet than not doing, in terms of evolution. Early humans unsure of whether a shape in the distance was an animal or just a nicely-formed rock, for example, would have almost always been better choosing the former option and running.
Other scientists say that identifying faces is a very early phenomenon in the process of understanding something. A study in 2009 found that non-face objects are understood at much the same speed as face ones.
If the brain sees something as a face, or other object, early on then that perceptions might stick. That could also explain why drawings that don’t actually look much like faces — four lines assembled in the right way — can be seen as a picture of a person.

The landscape of Mars — rocky but indistinct — has proved particularly fertile ground for object-spotters, and a range of potential objects have been spotted there.